Starting out, and before anyone thinks “of course life is not fair”, I want to touch upon the difference between the terms “Life” & “The World” – and why you should pay close attention when you use them interchangeably.
In short:
- “Life” is everything that’s happening by you
- “The World” is everything that’s happening to you
We naturally say “life” when we refer to everything that is about us, and we naturally say “the world” when we refer to the external; everything that is not us.
“Life” implies a personal perspective; “the world” implies a broader & more global perspective.
Want proof? When you say “Life is hard”, what do you mean exactly? That all our lives are hard? When you say “Life is sweet, lately”, don’t you just mean that your life has been sweet?
Now, think of when somebody says something like “The world is evil”, does it happen that they think their world is evil? Or that they just described all the external, all our collective deeds, to be.. evil?
What I’ve come to learn is: life is fair, but the world is not.
Your life is your day-to-day, everything you do, every thought you have and every little vibration or idea you push into existence. That’s to say everything that is part of you. Everything about you is true, and therefore is fair. That can’t be not fair.
And it makes sense, because put this way, “life” directly correlates to your input. If your input isn’t enough, you don’t get enough. If you provide enough, you just reap it.
While, the world is the set of rules & standards that are constantly being shaped by all of us combined and forced upon each of us individually, whether we want it or not.
This doesn’t have to do with your individual input, but all our inputs mixed together. That for sure is not fair. And at this day & age I pity anyone who still thinks it is.
Big part of adulthood is figuring out how to comply – How to comply with your rules & rules of the world at the same time.
Huge part of the struggle is always: How to make these rules from the external make sense? How to accept others & accept myself?
Through your efforts to find that middle ground, you grow. Reduce efforts and ignore that middle ground, you become quickly & fiercely irrelevant.
Fiercely! Like I’ve seen it happen before my eyes: People who are super smart, well-connected & sophisticated turn to be low-key cancelled the moment it becomes clear they can’t accept big part of the world is flawed, corrupt & non-sense.
I only realized this when I found myself struggling to make it work. I wanted to make things work with people & with myself, at the same time. And although we’re all different, it seems that we’re all affected. I would say sometimes even in the same magnitude. Lots of things are wrong with the world, one idea at a time. One big bias that just no one can escape from. Only through this struggle, and through negotiating myself into rolling with some of the external, here & there, I found:
- Most person you want to resonate with is always yourself
- You can accept anything & anyone, with the right boundaries
- You can not change, force or abandon the external
- Struggling to make ends meet is not “compromising” but “nobility”, at least to yourself
And then come all sorts of people who blame their “lives” on “the world”. Which just doesn’t make sense from a character development perspective. This common scenario goes like this:
- I want to be, do or get X
- X can’t be, without me accepting that the world is Y
- I don’t want to accept it
- I blame not getting X on Y
And there, we just defined “The Scarcity Mindset”. These people don’t get it.
There’s always more than ONE way to get X. They’re always just one change, one flip, one question away from it.
If you can’t accept the world for what it is, then you don’t have the right to want.
First, because we’re all same.
Second, because it loudly tells you’re unwilling to struggle.
You’re unwilling to make ends meet, do the work, ask the questions, test hypotheses and get to a middle ground. A middle ground where you can accept both yourself and the people. That’s why this is considered a big part of adulthood, and potential, in general.
Why do you think it’s a struggle to want something?
Not all struggles are physical, some are psychological, but this is old news.
The approach most people don’t apply is: Questions → Struggles → Answers.
And although it’s vivid, most people sadly prefer shortcuts; blame it on the world.
The contract I’m trying to maintain with myself is: Never call life unfair before you’ve put in work. Mental & physical. But, suffice it to say, that at this point of time, I’m happy with my middle ground. I -try to- accept the differences, and hold on to my principles.
Life pays whatever price you ask of it
For every request, you get a response.
You get what you repeatedly do, become what you repeatedly are, and believe what you repeatedly think.
On every new day you’re a new version of you that doesn’t necessarily comply with older versions.
I changed my thinking, it changed my life, I started attracting everything I deserve. And ever since then, I almost have no regrets. I don’t want you to think that you’re stuck for life. No one is.
Conclusion:
I whole-heartedly believe the world is fucked up and is yet to be.
I also believe life is zero-sum and we ultimately get what we deserve.